


Life, uh, finds a way

by saltslimes



Category: Venom (Movie 2018)
Genre: Alien Biology, Bonding, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Mpreg, Other, Sounding, Tentacle Sex, Xeno, again kind of, kind of, not kidding about that rating, xenopreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-23
Packaged: 2019-08-05 00:43:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16357331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltslimes/pseuds/saltslimes
Summary: Venom notices it on probably week three. And he doesn’t say anything then because, frankly, he assumes it’s cancer.OrEddie and Venom make a series of huge mistakes.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> in the comics Eddie and Venom have a baby through Venom's asexual reproduction methods, but there's nothing more fun than researching hybridization and considering the terror of genesis, so....
> 
> sorry for all the things i wrote in the sex scene part
> 
> also warning for puke

Venom notices it on probably week three. And he doesn’t say anything then because, frankly, he assumes it’s cancer.

Cancer is something that seems to just happen. Kind of an alien concept to a symbiote, but not hard to understand. Extra cells that serve no purpose. In his first host he assumed it was normal, some organ that had to grow in late. By the time he got to Eddie he had enough human knowledge. It was what Carlton Drake was trying to cure. It was a pursuit, for humans, the elimination of these rogue cells. A tiny cluster might grow slowly or fast, but sooner or later it would encroach on Eddie’s organs and render them nonfunctional.

He doesn’t say anything when he notices because it will probably upset Eddie and when he’s stressed everything tastes worse and feels prickly. The other reason is… more self-serving. Symbiotic. It’s a great word, Venom thinks. Human language (at least the one Eddie speaks) is a little ugly, a little clunky, it doubles back on itself and spits in the face of logic. But symbiote is a nice word. He makes an effort to look it up. Symbiote, or symbiont, a creature engaged in a symbiotic relationship:   "the living together of unlike organisms".

He doesn’t tell Eddie for the same reason he doesn’t  _ do _ anything, at first. It’s because when he scouts out a cyst or tumor or something else that isn’t supposed to be there, he eats it. And he figures it won’t hurt to give it a few more weeks to get a little bigger.

Other stuff gets in the way. Venom doesn’t like to think of himself as needy, but he’s aware that he takes up a lot of Eddie’s attention. Eddie is self sufficient until he isn’t. He’s a host until he isn’t. It can be anywhere, at any time, although now that they’ve been together more than a few months, Venom likes to think that he’s better at spotting it.

They unlock the door to the apartment and Eddie chucks the newspaper in the direction of the couch. Venom waits until Eddie’s in the bathroom scrubbing dirt out from under his nails to manifest himself.

**You’re upset.**

“Jesus!” Eddie smacks a hand on the edge of the sink. “Don’t just pop out like that when I’m in front of a mirror. Freaks me out.”

**Sorry. You’re upset.**

“I’m not upset, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

**We’ve been over this. I can taste your neurochemicals. You’re upset.**

“Always with the fucking neurochemicals,” Eddie says. But he sits down on the lid of the toilet. It  _ feels _ sad to be like this.

**You can talk to me.**

“Sometimes I can. Sometimes you want to eat my organs.”

**Not anymore.** Venom tries not to be hurt by this. When Eddie is sad he’s kind of unstoppable. He’s a--what’s that thing--a steamroller. On a hill. Venom climbs part-way out of him and manifests a hand to cup the bottom of Eddie’s jaw.

**Talk to me, Eddie.**

“I don’t know. I feel… can you feel that? Empty or something.”

**I can fix that, Eddie.**

“Not that kind of empty.”

**Still.** He can feel Eddie’s pulse speeding up. Blood moving downwards. But he waits for Eddie to make the first move, because it’s always better that way. It takes a moment. Eddie drums his fingers on his knee. Venom doesn’t make a move. Stays perfectly still, curled like a shield behind his lungs. Then Eddie peels off his t-shirt. He drops it beside the bath mat. And then it’s the belt, he unbuckles it. That’s all the invitation Venom needs.

They fuck in the bathroom a lot. Mostly because Eddie seems annoyed when he has to wash his bedsheets if they’ve been freshly changed. But Venom likes it in there anyways. The smell of bleach, the look of cum on the tiles. And he likes it in Eddie. In the literal and… the other sense of the term. He slides out of Eddie’s dick painfully slow, because he likes that almost-choking sound he makes when he’s driven right to the edge.

“Fuck me already,” Eddie wheezes, and Venom is more than happy to oblige. Mapping out the nerves in the human body was almost laughably easy, but there was a learning curve to  _ manipulating _ them. He gauges Eddie’s enjoyment through sound, heartbeat, spasms. Riding an orgasm in the human body is--more of a rush than he can remember otherwise. And it’s made better by the way Eddie  _ feels _ it, the way he staggers and Venom has to catch them, the way he melts at Venom’s touch.

It’s good. It’s good.

**Your cum tastes pretty good, Eddie.**

“Don’t say that.”

**It’s true though.**

“To you maybe. I think you have a weird sense of taste.” It does taste good. Venom’s glad he stopped leaving it around. One or two times he just spit it somewhere into Eddie’s body cavity. On one occasion he balled it in some of his cells and sort of forgot about it. Eating it is better. Neater, too. Eddie likes it when they’re neat, which Venom didn’t really get until they’d been sharing the apartment for a while. It was nicer when it was neat. Things had a place, and they could be put in it, and that was nice. Soothing. Sensible.

Eddie drags them to bed after that. He has to sleep a lot more than Venom, so he stays awake for a while flipping through a magazine on the bedside table. Then he retreats inside to look around, check that everything is in working order.

Heart, lungs, liver--that thing is still growing, pretty fast. It almost doubles in size each time Venom checks, and he’s going to do something about it soon. But not yet. It’s not causing any problems yet, so it can wait. He goes back to the magazine for a while. And then he goes to sleep.

[X] 

Eddie wakes up to his phone. He gets so few texts that he doesn’t turn the sound off, so it buzzes off the side of his bed and lands with a soft  _ thunk _ in the carpet. He digs over the side with an arm before begrudgingly opening his eyes.

“Hey, you awake?” he mumbles.

**What.** So probably he wasn’t.

“Phone,” Eddie just mumbles, pointing. Venom makes the effort to manifest just so he can sigh loudly in Eddie’s ear before he grabs the phone and deposits it in his hand.

It’s Anne. She’s calling, not texting. Anne never texts.

“Did you forget already?”

“W-no, nope, didn’t forget. I’m putting my shoes on now.” He swats at Venom before he can say anything to contradict this (although it would probably be just in Eddie’s head). There’s something uniquely stressful about an entity no one else can hear shit-talking people in public. It feels precarious or something.

“Sure Eddie,” Anne says, and hangs up. It’s kind of odd to hang out with your ex-fiance, probably, but Eddie doesn’t really have other friends, and if he’s being honest, he kind of likes Dan. That thick heat of jealousy isn’t the same anymore. It’s hard to imagine being in… any kind of relationship after Venom. He eats a few handfuls of raw meat out of the fridge (relationships are about compromise) and heads out.

Venom is weirdly bouncy. He squirms around Eddie’s organs as they’re waiting for the cable car. He gets more stir crazy than Eddie, which he guesses makes sense since he’s not usually the one driving. And he likes Anne. Not in a… not in the way he likes Eddie. But he likes seeing her. It’s hot on the cable car, despite it being February. 

**What’s wrong with you?** Venom asks, as Eddie shifts uncomfortably in his seat for the third time. Nothing’s wrong. He feels vaguely sick lots of the time. It probably has something to do with the kind of shit he eats to keep Venom happy. He doesn’t dignify the question with an answer, because it’ll pass, and he doesn’t feel like looking like a weirdo on the cable car today.

When they get off he feels better. It’s warm for February, but the breeze is nice, even if it tastes like smog. Anne lets him in and he follows her upstairs. She has a bunch of papers spread out over the kitchen table, and a lot of magazines. Eddie picks one up at random.

“City Mom?” he asks.  **What’s that supposed to mean? And look at that ugly infant.** Eddie stifles a snort. The kid on the cover  _ is _ kind of… lumpy looking.

“Oh yeah. Dan and I are--thinking about trying.” It takes Eddie a minute to sort of process that, because it’s so far outside the realm of shit that’s normally circulating in his brain.  **Trying what?** Venom asks, and when Eddie doesn’t say anything he peels out of him and asks Anne.

“Oh, uh, for a baby. Trying to have a baby. I don’t know if you… do that kind of thing on your planet.”

**No, we have different methods,** he says. Eddie winces. Not out of embarrassment though. His stomach is turning over.

“You want some tea? Either… of you?” Anne asks. Venom slips back into Eddie and tells him definitely not.

“You hate tea,” he says, dropping onto the couch and willing his stomach to calm down.

“I’m trying to cut out coffee.”

“Ew,” Eddie says. Anne just laughs. She’s putting the kettle on anyways. A baby. Were they ever going to do that? Probably not, honestly. When they were together they didn’t talk about it. Anne, specifically, didn’t talk about it. She steered conversations  _ away _ from it. But Dan was different. When you’re with a surgeon and his name is Dan of all things, it’s not the same.

He’s not sad about it, it’s more bewildering. He can’t imagine Anne as a mom but he thinks she’d be good at it.

“You guys’d be good parents,” he says. Anne turns around to lean on the counter and smiles.

“Thanks, Eddie.” She turns back to the tea and then pauses and looks back again. “Are you okay? You look kind of… sweaty.”

Eddie opens his mouth to say that he’s fine but it immediately becomes clear that he’s  _ not _ fine. So he bolts for the bathroom and heaves his guts into the toilet. Anne comes into the doorway, makes a noise of surprise, and then leaves. She comes back a minute later with a glass of water, which Eddie gratefully accepts.

“Are you making him eat weird stuff again?” she asks, folding her arms.

**“No.** ” Venom manifests out to say that for Anne’s benefit. Eddie coughs into the toilet.

“I’m gonna go home,” he says. Anne has her eyes narrowed. She’s staring down Venom, and Venom’s staring back.

“You better not be doing anything to hurt him.”

**“I dislike this as much as he does,** ” Venom assures her. 

“S’probably just bad meat. Or milk. I never check the dates on anything.”

“Gross. Call if you need something,” Anne says, following him to the door. He nods. Out on the street he feels better again, but only marginally. The relief of vomiting is wearing off.

**You think their baby will be ugly?**

“Don’t be rude.” The cable car is approaching at what feels like a snail’s pace. He just wants to get home and sleep the rest of this shitty Saturday away. 

**Just asking.**

“It’s rude.”

**I wouldn’t say it to** **_them_ ** **.**

“Good to know.”

**Are you okay?** Oof. There’s genuine concern in that, and he almost hates it when Venom is genuine with him. Just because it… it feels precarious. So he steers the conversation back to Anne and Dan.

“It’s wild you know, that they could just be parents. In less than a year.”

**You call me a parasite but do you know how reproduction works for your species? It’s disgusting.**

“Uhh, I mean, I guess.” The cable car rolls up. Eddie gets on. He’s staring at his phone scrolling through twitter and thinking less than nothing when Venom  _ stands them up _ and marches them up to the doors. As soon as the car comes to a stop Venom is shouting  **Get off** so he gets off and walks out onto the semi-empty sidewalk.

“Uh, care to let me in on what’s happening?” He’s met with dead silence. “V? You gotta talk to me. If I don’t know what’s going on--”

**We need to go home. Now.**

“That’s what we  _ were _ doing, before you made us get off the cable car.”

**Slow. Let me drive.** Eddie throws his hands up and as he does Venom coats them in black. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> jolks  
> i pretended it was gonna be a two-shot but its too long  
> can you believe i edited this? wowe

They take the rooftops, tearing through the city. It’s under three minutes before they’re climbing in the window of their apartment. Venom closes the window gently before receding back into Eddie.

“Okay, are we gonna talk now? I’d love to know what’s happening.”

**Eddie, I think you’re really not going to like this.**

“Okay?”

**I didn’t tell you because cancer tastes great, so I—**

“Sorry, cancer what? Wanna repeat that? Do you wanna say that again,  _ right now?”  _ Eddie is vaguely aware that he’s yelling, but fuck.

**Eddie, you have to calm down.** And wow, that’s a new one coming from the alien that inhabits his body and occasionally  _ consumes _ people.

“Me calm down? You just said I have cancer--”

**Humans always have some cancer.**

“No they don’t!”

**Yes they do! A little bit!**

“Literally what the fuck are you talking about?”

**I thought it was cancer but it… tumors don’t have heartbeats.** That actually knocks Eddie back. He stumbles to the couch and sits down, and as soon as he sits down he realizes he’s going to puke again. 

After he flushes the toilet he sinks his head into his hands and just stays like that for a bit.

“What the fuck, man?” he whispers. Venom climbs out of him so they’re face to face. “What the fuck?” he whispers, even quieter.

**Are you angry with me?**

“No? I mean, fuck, I don’t know. Tell me about the cancer next time.”

**But I eat it all the time. Cells out of place. Cells which serve no purpose. They would impede your body’s functioning.**

“O-kay, I guess. And there’s something in us--in me--that isn’t that?”

**It’s something else. But not a parasite. It’s made of… us. Or something adjacent.**

“What’s that mean?”

**Not human cells, not my cells either. Something intermediate.**

“What the fuck.” Eddie scrubs a hand over his face. There’s mold crawling up the tile grout, deep black with a green tinge to it. Anne’s bathroom smells like soap over bleach. Eddie’s smells like just bleach. Venom smells like polyurethane and formaldehyde and blood. 

“Could be some kind of super cancer.”

**How do we find out?** It’s a little nerve wracking when Venom wants Eddie’s advice. Usually he’s the peanut gallery to their life, he has a lot of bad ideas and a few good ones. Now he’s just open, teeth out, tongue in, asking Eddie for guidance. Like he should know what the fuck to do just because he’s the one from a species that sexually reproduces.

“Uhhhh. Anne,” he says. Eloquent. But Venom doesn’t bother making fun of him, and that just impresses further how terrifyingly real shit has just gotten. “Anne is smarter than us, we gotta go talk to her. And Dan is a doctor, so he knows what cancer is.” He’s absently aware that he literally sounds like a moron right now, but he feels like he doesn’t even have the mental capacity to get up off the bathroom floor. It’s Venom who stands them up and marches them back out the door. They take a cab up because, well, fuck it. Venom keeps nervously shifting around his organs and it’s making him feel like he wants to go puke round three.

When they get out in front of Anne’s place he dry-heaves into the gutter a few times and then hammers on her door.

It takes her a few minutes to answer. She’s in the same loose cardigan she was wearing before, her hair as pin-straight as usual. She looks so put-together it’s almost infuriating.  Not that he’s often (or ever) worried about looking put-together. But it highlights how irretrievably down the tubes his own life is.

“Eddie?” she prompts him because after she opens the door he doesn’t say anything or do anything.

**Ask her what to do,** Venom urges.

“I need to talk you, talk to you,” he manages to get out.

“Uh, yeah, come in?” She steps aside to let him in. They go upstairs to the kitchen. He sits back on the couch where he was maybe an hour ago and drums his fingers on his knee.

“Is everything okay?” Anne sits down across from him. His eyes dart over to the mommy magazines spread over the table. He forces his gaze back to the carpet.

“Uhhhhhh, Venom thinks that—uh.”

“Are you okay? Is he hurting you again, are you hurting him?”

**No! Eddie, tell her!**

“I think we’re pregnant. He’s pregnant—I’m—we are.”

The silence starts shocked, transitions to stifling. Eddie presses his fist to his mouth. Anne opens her mouth and then closes it again. She purses her lips.

“Did you get hit in the head maybe, on your way home, or yesterday?”

“It’s not—I know what it sounds like but Venom says it’s in there and he says tumours don’t have their own heartbeats, and he has a point about that.”

“I—maybe but that’s not—I mean. That’s insane.”

“More insane than the fact that he lives in my body and we can turn into a nine foot tall monster?”

“So what you and Venom somehow immaculately conceived—“

Eddie clears his throat. He can’t bring himself to lift his eyes from the carpet.

“Oh Eddie. Gross.” Anne stands up and then sits back down. “How does that even, I mean who—actually I don’t wanna know.” She presses her hands to her lips for a moment. Then she gets up and heads upstairs.

“Wait, Annie?”

“Just wait there!”

She comes back down a minute or two later and tosses him a pink cardboard box. Venom catches it. Eddie blinks at it.

“You serious?”

“You just told me you think you’re pregnant. So… test. Go pee on that.” She points to the bathroom.

He reads the box before opening it. Anne’s bathroom has little scented candles beside the tub.  _ Detects as early as one month from your last period _ . Well there’s some math he can’t do. The whole thing is ridiculous.

He doesn’t want to leave the bathroom holding a stick with pee on it (even if it came with a little cap) so he sits on the toilet reading the instructions over and over. Anne knocks on the door. 

“You okay in there? I’m gonna open this, so have pants on.” She opens it without waiting for a response.

“Well?”

“It didn’t change yet.”

“You don’t think Venom might be confused about this? I mean, his species doesn’t even… sexually reproduce.”

“ **Tumours don’t have heartbeats.** ” Venom manifests out to say that. It says something about Anne that she doesn’t even blink. But she does tap her fingers on the doorframe. Anne doesn’t like to wait. Eddie gives the test a shake, like he’s developing a polaroid. You’re actually not supposed to shake them, he thinks, he maybe heard that somewhere. Polaroids, not pregnancy tests. He doesn’t know shit about the latter.

Then Venom pulls his face over to focus. He’s looking at two little blue lines.

“Well?” Anne says, but processing has shut down so he just turns it around for her to see. “Oh shit,” she says. Eddie makes a noise somewhere between a snort of derision and a gag. Then from downstairs there’s keys in the door.

“Hey, you home?” Dan calls.

“In here,” Anne calls back, despite Eddies frantic motions for her not to. He doesn’t know what he was doing with those motions, it’s not like he can get out without seeing Dan. 

So he’s like that, sitting on the toilet seat in Anne’s starkly neutral bathroom, holding out a plastic stick with his own piss on it, and Venom half manifested out of his shoulder when Dan walks up, takes in this vignette, and frowns.

“Um,” he says.

“Eddie’s pregnant, apparently.”

“Sorry, what?”

Eddie just hefts the test again, feeling kind of boneless. Dan takes it from his unresisting fingers. Well he’s a doctor so like, doctors touch pee, right? It’s part of the job, probably. They make you touch some in medical school to see if you’re ready to handle it. That train of thought hits a wall because he’s low-key hyperventilating. Anne gives him another glass of water.

“Eddie, in a cis man a positive pregnancy test can indicate testicular cancer,” Dan starts, clearing his throat the way he does when he switches over from girlfriend’s-ex-boyfriend’s alien mode to doctor mode.

“ **If there was cancer in his balls I’d have noticed,** ” Venom says, out loud, which really helps. “ **This is on his liver. And its cells have their own genome, distinct from his or mine.** ”

“Hm. That would be… yeah… well. Teratoma maybe. Either way we should get down to the hospital and take a look.”

“ **No! MRI!** ” Venom says that through Eddie’s mouth, which doesn’t at all help how puke-y he feels. Dan has both hands up in a placating gesture.

“Doesn’t have to be an MRI. There’s imaging we can do that’s not in the harmful range of sound. And labs are a good idea, probably.”

Eddie wouldn’t say Venom slumps inside him, but he does shiver down his back in a particular way, curling somewhere around his organs. And then he fully disperses out, his little magic trick, blending into Eddie like he was never there. 

It’s an awkward Uber ride, certainly. The driver has on a playlist of seemingly the worst of the worst of Eminem collaborations, and he doesn’t even offer to turn it off. Eddie leans his head against the window while Dan types out emails or something on his phone.

Anne sits in the front with one leg crossed over the other and her hands folded in her lap. Not one of her hairs is out of place. 

The smell and the sound of the hospital puts Venom on edge, evidently, because he prickles along Eddie’s spine and ruffles his lungs uncomfortably. He pushes a hand into his sternum with a light wheeze.

“Relax, okay? Please. I got this.”

**Okay, Eddie.** His tone isn’t sulky, it’s just subdued. Never mind that Eddie doesn’t got this at all and Venom can clearly taste his apprehension. Blood work is easy enough, but then Dan brings in a portable ultrasound and Venom shudders Eddie’s lungs again.

“I’m gonna turn it on for just a second to test how Venom reacts to the sound. You said four to six thousand hertz, I think.”

“And the ultrasound is quieter?” Eddie asks. He’s eyeing the wand, and the bottle of gel, and he really, really doesn’t want to do this. Why’s there always got to be something living in him that isn’t supposed to be there?

“No, it’s past twenty thousand hertz, so it should be outside the harmful range. I’m just gonna turn it on for a second, okay? To test.”

Eddie nods. He wishes… he wishes Anne wasn’t in the room. Or something. He wishes Venom wasn’t all divided into him, and instead was half-out, so he wasn’t alone on the table. Even if he isn’t technically alone on the table. Anne is leaning against the counter, beside a jar of cotton-balls. Everything about the scene is despicably, unacceptably mundane.

The machine makes a soft noise, and Dan flips it off after a second and looks to Eddie for confirmation.

“Yeah? That was fine,” he says.  **It’s outside of the lethal range. I already told you the range** , Venom says.

“Okay, if you can lift up your shirt then.” The paper on the exam table crinkles softly. Dan finds the mass on his liver and the sound changes, and Dan stares at the screen, and then Anne comes over and looks at the screen and Eddie’s looking at it two but there’s just like, a blob.

“Amazing. Did your--Venom must be keeping your liver intact, otherwise you’d be dead by now.”

“ **I was managing the blood supply,** ” Venom climbs out to say. His white eyes fixate on the screen. Eddie’s hearing it. Dan’s hearing it, and then so is Anne, and Venom obviously. That’s a heartbeat.

“How long has this been growing?”

“ **Two months** .”

“You were going to not tell me about cancer for  _ two months _ ?” Eddie wheezes. Dan hits a button on the machine and then removes the wand and shuts it off. Venom turns to face Eddie.

“ **I didn’t know.** ”

“Well, um, if you want a copy of the imaging I can print one. This is definitely, probably really dangerous for your body, so I don’t know if you want to talk about options or about prenatal--”

That’s kind of enough right there. Eddie hops down off the table as Venom slips back inside him and he says “Thanks Dan, have a great day, bye Anne.” And then he just books it out of the hospital. Venom takes over by the time he’s outside, and he doesn’t use any part of his brain until they’re back at the apartment, and he’s slumped against the door and Venom’s receded back into him. He can’t breathe. He literally can’t draw a breath, and he can hear Venom telling him that he needs to, but he can’t. Venom forces him to the ground, shoves his head between his legs. He focuses on the wood grain. There’s a mark where whoever painted the door fucked up and dropped their brush. There’s a divot where some piece of furniture must have scraped the floor, or maybe it happened when he was fighting Carlton Drake’s guys.

That was… a thousand years ago, probably. That happened to someone else who lived a completely different life and then died and now there’s Eddie on the floor only breathing because Venom is forcing him to.

After a while it fades out, and then he’s just sitting on the floor with sunlight spearing in through the half-drawn curtains. He checks his phone. It’s after six, and he has a lot of missed calls. He puts his phone away and clears his throat.

“We should uh, do something, probably. Right? So it doesn’t kill either of us.”

**If that’s what you want. I can just kill it now.**

Eddie doesn’t say anything. His palms are sweaty. He feels like he’s never been this tired and awake at the same time before.

**Eddie? What do you want?**

But he can’t… say, because he doesn’t know. He just sits there for a while longer. He gets up and goes to the fridge and drinks all the milk, and he lets Venom eat a carton of eggs with the shells on. They don’t talk. He can feel Venom antsy against his spine, wanting to ask, wanting to move, but he’s snowed in, he’s unable to take a step in any direction.

“Can I just sleep for a bit? Just for a while, and then we’ll figure it out.”

**Okay.**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come hang out on [twit](https://twitter.com/saltslimes) if ur nasty  
> come hang on [tumblr](https://saltslimes.tumblr.com/) if you're less nasty


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to all the people i lied to on twitter when i said i was gonna post yesterday, i got smacked on my lil pizza hands in class so i decided to play sims on the couch for like 6 hours

He doesn’t think he’ll actually fall asleep, but he drops into bed and the whole world fades easily into background noise. When he wakes up Venom has arms around him. It’s night. 3:30, when he checks his phone. Venom doesn’t ask. Eddie puts on shoes and a jacket and he goes downstairs, down the block, out to Mrs. Chen’s. But he doesn’t go inside. He leans against the wall where Maria used to sit. He stuffs his hands in his pockets and tries to think. Everything in his brain is sludge.

“What do you want to do, V?” He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. Usually when he asks something like this Venom says that he wants to eat somebody, or that he wants to drive the bike off something again.

**I want you to be happy.**

It literally feels like a blow to the sternum. Eddie presses a hand to his chest and somewhere under there something has a heartbeat, it’s half ugly and half venom, and he doesn’t know if it’s a gentler thing to kill it or give it a chance.

“What do you think it’s going to be?” he whispers. He feels Venom shift along his back.

 **It has a spine. So, a vertebrate.** ”

“Fuck.”

There are a thousand questions. What if it dies? What if it truly is a parasite and it carves him out like a wasp larvae does a ladybug? What if it needs a host when it’s born? What if it’s evil and uncontrollable? 

 **I can take it out, Eddie.** Venom says. He shakes his head.

“No. Let’s… we can leave it for now, huh?”

**In that case, can we eat? Your blood supply is… overtaxed.**

“Yeah, okay. Yeah.” he pushes off the wall and into Mrs. Chen’s. She’s behind the counter reading the paper.

“Eddie, you look--”

“Like shit, I know. What do we need pal?”

“You still have that parasite?” she calls.

“You would not believe,” he says. Venom ruffles at that.

**Vitamin C. Chocolate. Riboflavin and folic acid.**

“I do not know where to find any of those things.”

**I’ll point us in the right direction.**

Eddie finds that his hands shake as he’s pulling things from the shelves. Almost imperceptibly. Mrs. Chen asks him if he’s been meditating. He has, kind of. When he puts his items up on the counter she doesn’t raise an eyebrow. They’re past the eyebrow raising phase of their relationship.

[X]

It seems physically impossible to have a meeting more awkward than his last encounter with Anne and Dan. That’s why he agrees to have dinner with them at all. That, and Anne hasn’t stopped calling for almost a month, and he’s afraid one or both of them will show up at his apartment and… beat him up with words or something.

And yet, when he’s knocking on their door in a hoodie slightly damp with sweat he senses that it’s actually going to be even more awkward… somehow.

**You’re stressed. It’s taxing for your organs.**

“Oh, sorry, god forbid I do anything to my organs.”

**Your organs are already overtaxed.**

“Don’t tell me to--”

**If we ate more people it would be less of a problem.**

“I ate a literal bottle of vitamins today and I ate it with _my_ mouth because you were asleep so that’s gotta count for something.” Eddie folds his arms tight over his chest. Then Dan opens the door.

“Hey! Eddie, come on in!” Dan is kind of a delightful person who it almost physically hurts Eddie to be around. He has a towel slung over one shoulder like he’s hosting his own cooking show. Eddie is suddenly painfully aware that he hasn’t washed his hoodie in a week. It doesn’t help that Dan’s eyes immediately dart to the vicinity of where small demi-parasite is growing. It doesn’t show, but it is apparently crushing Eddie’s gallbladder and Venom had to take a chunk out of his liver to give it space to grow.

At least they discussed that one first. They had a long talk about the cancer but it resulted in Venom popping up at random intervals to tell Eddie about two cells out of place and it made him so stressed he crashed the bike into a stopped bus. So they agreed that Venom could have run of the body on cancer.

Dinner was awkward. The mommy magazines were conspicuously absent. He watched Anne take a beer out of the fridge and immediately put it back. Then Dan started grilling him about prenatal vitamins, which was Venom’s issue to deal with, so he manifested out to describe the pretty horrific and kind of expensive weekly regimen they had going.

“I might be able to snag something from the hospital for you,” Dan said, setting down his wineglass very gently.

“I’ve got a good check coming in from some freelancing I did last week, it’s cool.” It was sort of cool. He’d decided not to buy any baby shit until he saw the shape of demi-parasite and also that it was alive outside of his body. And that he was alive. And he was also trying not to think about that, because the idea of Venom and the tiny squirming thing inside him both dying in his cooling corpse was enough to wake him up drenched in sweat and fumbling for the bucket beside his bed.

“So Venom, your species normally reproduces asexually,” Anne says. Oh, they’re doing this now. Eddie drains his water glass and wishes he had the option to bleed into _Venom_ , and absent himself from this conversation.

“ **We call it spawning.** ”

“Can all of your species do it or only specific individuals?” Dan asks.

“ **Anyone under the right conditions.** ”

“So then… you don’t really have genders? Or, sex, rather.”

“ **We have sex,** ” Venom says. Eddie chokes on nothing.

“Well, yeah, we know that,” Anne says.

“I think she meant physical sex,” Dan says.

“He knows what she meant,” Eddie wheezes. Venom laughs for only him to hear.

“ **Gender seemed to be largely optional here. I figured Eddie’s was good.** ”

“Makes things easy, I guess,” Dan says.

“And it comes with a lot of privileges,” Anne adds. Eddie gets up to get more water. He pauses at the sink. He used to clean this sink. It was his problem to clean. And now it isn’t. And that should sting, but it doesn’t. Instead he’s thinking about the worm blanket on his bed and the way Venom is going to whisper in his ear when they’re going to sleep. He’s thinking about sun spilling through the curtains and he’s thinking about the smell of blood.

Anne joins him at the sink.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m actually really good.”

[X]

Anne bangs on the door harder.

“I know you’re home you absolute bastard!” There’s a light shuffling sound from inside, and then finally, the door opens. Eddie looks damp, which is seemingly his usual state at the moment. He’s in a very loose hoodie and he at least has the decency to look guilty.

“Annie, I know what you’re gonna say, but my editor wanted the piece out before Monday and i just--”

“Just decided to throw my client under the bus? For fuck’s sake Eddie, you never learn, you literally never learn.”

“Hi Eddie,” Dan calls from behind her. She doesn’t have to look back to know he’s doing a small wave, because Eddie automatically returns it.

“Oh, hi Dan, didn’t realize you came along.”

“We were supposed to be getting lunch,” he says.

“That’s nice, maybe you could type all this up in like an email and then send it to me and that way you could get your lunch and we could,” he pauses to swallow, or maybe clear his throat, “not do this.” He swats a hand by his ear the way Anne’s gotten to know he does when Venom is saying something that is either distracting or pissing him off. The way he’s leaning on the door looked casual at first but…

“Eddie are you okay?” Dan says. “You look kind of…bad.”

“Oh, thanks, it’s not like everyone isn’t always, fuck, shit, what?” Eddie takes a step back and lets go of the door and presumably Venom says something else because he says: “Definitely don’t do that, especially not right now.” And then he makes a choking noise and doubles over.

“Eddie?” Anne reaches for him but he stumbles back quickly, and she pulls Dan inside and shuts the door. Eddie drops to his hands and knees and when Dan reaches for him it’s one of Venom’s black arms that swats him away.

Eddie gags, chokes again, and cups a hand over his mouth. Weird clear liquid spews from between his clenched fingers, spattering the parquet flooring. His eyes are tearing up just from the force of it. Then Venom masks over his face, unhinges his horrible jaw and vomits what looks like an organ onto the floor. He recedes into Eddie immediately, and Eddie drops to the floor like he’s just had all his bones removed. The thing on the floor is moving.

It seems to happen in slow motion now. The shining little sac that Eddie and Venom just brought up bursts like a yolk striking the pan wrong, and the thing inside is just a ball of off-black sludge, the color of old old blood. Eddie shoves himself up onto his elbows.

“No, no, no,” what do I do--Ven, what--” he’s reaching for the limp little pile of goo, but before he touches it it takes on a form. A baby small enough to fit in the palm of Anne’s hand. Still coated in slime and clear fluid but now with a mouth, now with tiny teeth _holy shit_ and now with little all-white eyes barely opened.

Anne runs for towels. Dan helps Eddie to lean up against the back of the couch, and it’s Venom who scoops up the baby and pulls it--her--in to cradle against Eddie’s chest. He’s crying. Eddie’s crying, maybe from pain, maybe from puking up a baby barely bigger than a smartphone. Dan is in full doctor mode, taking vitals and estimating how to adjust an apgar score for a child that is more than obviously only 50% human.

Eddie leans his head against the couch and just cries. Anne is wiping up the floor as Venom manifests out to wrap thick arms around him.

“ **It’s okay, Eddie. We’re okay.** ”

“She’s alive,” he manages to get out, and Anne realizes he’s shaking. She pauses with the dish towel--which honestly is going to need to get thrown out, it’s stained with inhuman and human fluids.

“She’s beautiful Eddie,” she says. He can’t answer, but he swallows thickly and nods.

[X]

It’s hot for May, but not so bad. Eddie dips a hand into the bed and pulls it out covered in slime.

“For fucks sake. We have to get groceries and right _now_ she decides to be liquid?” He waits the requisite twenty seconds for their daughter to need lungs again and she reshapes into a giggling baby. She’s fucking huge for being a month old, by which he means, she’s about the size of a month-old baby. But considering how small she was when she was born, that’s insane. She was big enough to fit in a teacup.

Dan said something about hybrid vigor and then Eddie fell asleep and let Venom drive because even on day one she cried loud enough to keep him from getting more than two hours of sleep at a time.

“ **Kiss, kiss for you,** ” Venom coos, and trickles down from Eddie’s shoulder to butt his closed teeth against their daughter’s cheek. Eddie scoops her into the baby sling that Anne and Dan got, an item he could tell cost at least sixty bucks despite being worth ten. But it was useful, actually.

“I wish she didn’t have teeth already,” Eddie said. “Huh? Isn’t that right? Wish you didn’t have teeth, little beast.”

**Don’t call her a beast.**

“‘S a term of endearment, come on.”

**Oh, like parasite?**

“Maybe.”

Mrs. Chen’s eyes light up when they come through the door. She thrusts her hands over the counter.

“Hand her over, Eddie,” she says. He lifts her out and passes her up to Mrs. Chen, the only person to successfully not ever get bitten by their delightful and charming offspring.

“Okay Hel, be chill and cool,” Eddie says. Mrs. Chen smiles wide as soon as she has Helen in her arms.

“Are you getting rest? You look tired.”

“Take it up with the spawn, she’s the one who wants me dead,” Eddie says, waving her off. He grabs a basket and starts grabbing stuff off the shelves. Baby eats a combination of formula and live animals (usually fish since they’re easy to keep). She’s incredibly expensive, but Eddie’s had more money around since he quit drinking, and Mrs. Chen cuts him a deal on diapers since he keeps the store safe.

“I have a box of clothes from my daughter-in-law, they’ll fit Helen in a month probably,” she calls over the counter.

“Oh, thanks Mrs. Chen,” Eddie says. There’s a crash from outside--glass hitting the ground, and then there’s a small explosion. It rattles the window.

 **Bad guys.** Venom does not phrase it as a question.

“You okay to babysit for a couple minutes?” Eddie asks, skidding up to the counter and dropping his half-full basket. Mrs. Chen rolls her eyes.

“Obviously. Don’t get killed,” she says.

“I never do,” Eddie calls over his shoulder. Venom laughs only for him to hear, and by the time he’s out the door he’s enveloped and Venom is driving. The guys across the street have seriously heavy artillery just to rob a jewelry store. There are civilians diving out of the way and a few people trapped by the smoke and rubble.

Venom grabs the first dude and chucks him into a wall.

“ **Let’s get this done quick,** ” he says. “ **Don’t want to keep the baby waiting.** ”

Inside, Eddie cringes. But he’s not able to deny the warmth that flood through him. _Hell yeah, babe._ That’s mother-fucking parenting.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> nobody beta'd this so i must shoulder the blame for all the mistakes
> 
> eyyy [twit](https://twitter.com/saltslimes) if ur nasty  
> ahhh [tumblr](https://saltslimes.tumblr.com/) if you're less nasty

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know why I refuse to let Eddie and Venom have sex anywhere other than the bathroom. It just feels like how they roll. Plus sometimes after sex you're tired and you don't want to do all the sex chores, also, if your boyfriend is a slime that lives in your body all the downsides of shower sex probably become a non-issue.
> 
>  
> 
> [x](https://media.giphy.com/media/VHW0X0GEQQjiU/giphy.gif)


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